


It Catches Up With You

by azephirin



Series: Intriguing Possibilities [4]
Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Ambiguity, Bisexual Character, College, Exes, Misunderstanding, Multi, Porn Watching, Sex Tape, Technology, Texting, sex while high
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-11
Updated: 2011-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:23:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sex, lies, and .mov files.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Catches Up With You

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://ninhursag.dreamwidth.org/profile)[ **ninhursag**](http://ninhursag.dreamwidth.org/)'s awesome prompt. This takes place in the [Intriguing Possibilities](http://archiveofourown.org/series/6301) 'verse and will make more sense if you've read at least [Eventually We Find Our Way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/154011) (it's short!).
> 
> To the extent that any of these characters are real people, this story depicts them as they are fictitiously portrayed in Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's ~~RPF 'verse~~ movie _The Social Network_.
> 
> The title is from one of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack compositions.

I was expecting to find any number of things when I opened up file2.mov. I was hoping for the video of my niece’s dance recital, which Eduardo said he’d saved on this computer but which I hadn’t found yet. It was also, very likely, something stupid that Dustin had sent him off the Internet. I was also expecting, possibly, porn: Eduardo liked arty Andrew Blake–style girl-on-girl, some of which I was morally certain he watched for the costuming and set design; raunchy, musclebound guy-on-guy, with a lot of double penetration; threesomes and moresomes in any combination; and arty, usually female-dominant BDSM with weird camera angles and titles like _The Elegant Spanking_ and _Silken Sleeves_. (Our porn tastes didn’t overlap much: I’d watch the Andrew Blake with him, mainly for the costuming and the set design, but the rest of it didn’t really appeal to me. I tended to like things like the Crash Pad series and indieporn where everybody had their real body hair.) So I was anticipating my niece dressed as a dancing snowflake, or possibly something involving talking cats, or also possibly several men coming on another man’s face or a woman putting a collar on somebody.

The blurry opening was not terribly surprising. But I did not expect the blur to step away from the camera and reveal itself as a very young and half-dressed Mark Zuckerberg.

As he moved farther away, the scene came into focus—just as I heard Eduardo’s unmistakable giggle and saw him sitting, also shirtless, on a bed. He was all limbs, as though he hadn’t had his height for very long and wasn’t sure what to do with it—his build now wasn’t much different, but a few pounds and several years had given him the confidence and presence of an adult. He’d been coltish then, a lanky almost-man. “Get over here,” he said to Mark, and Mark did, pushing Eduardo back onto the bed as enthusiastically as Eduardo pulled Mark down in tandem. Their landing was sprawling and clumsy, and Eduardo giggled again—and I heard another laugh, a shorter, lower one, that could only have been Mark. They nuzzled for a moment, still smiling, arms around each other, legs tangled together. Eduardo kissed him, and it was equally ungraceful but so full of affection that it made my heart hurt a little bit.

Then Mark pushed himself up onto his hands and refocused. He undid the button of Eduardo’s pants, which looked like dark slacks—even in college, apparently, Eduardo could not be coerced into jeans—and Eduardo buried his hands in Mark’s riotous bloom of curls. Mark yanked down Eduardo’s pants and underwear—plain boxers back then—and lowered his head, and Eduardo made a happy, vulnerable noise in the back of his throat.

I realized that I was watching my boyfriend have sex with his ex-boyfriend, and even though it was a sex tape he hadn’t told me about, it still felt invasive. I closed the video and the laptop, and a few moments later I found myself in the kitchen staring at the counter. I couldn’t ask Eduardo about it right this minute: he was out with Dustin, Chris, and some of their friends from Harvard whose trip to the Bay Area had coincided with his own. Mark might even have been with them, although their détente was still in the process of formation.

It wasn’t like Eduardo had cheated on me. He’d probably been nineteen when he and Mark had taken that video. I turned to go back into the office and look at the registry files to see how many times and how recently the video had been opened— No. I wasn’t that kind of girlfriend, had never been that kind of girlfriend to him or to anyone else, and Eduardo deserved better than that from me.

I poured myself a glass of wine, because I needed some libation to help my brain through this, and then I texted Gina, because I had to tell somebody about this.

  


+||+||+

**Orlain Sessions (415-555-1212):** i need to tell you something that you have to swear to take to the grave.

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** ok

**Orlain Sessions (415-555-1212):** TO THE GRAVE, GINA

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** OKAY!

**Orlain Sessions (415-555-1212):** eduardo & mark made a sex tape & i just found it on e’s computer.

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** Omgwtf!!!!!!!!!

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** i just have 2 ask so that i no whether 2 hire a hit man: r we talking college-era?

**Orlain Sessions (415-555-1212):** oh! yeah, def college. they’re prob like 19.

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** dude yr bf was a hot twink

**Orlain Sessions (415-555-1212):** how is it that you think of the single most inappropriate thing to say at any given time?

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** b/c it’s tru. actually he still is a hot twink.

**Orlain Sessions (415-555-1212):** i am never speaking to you again.

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** dude u luv me

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** im @ lunch w/ neila & her parents, but give me 5 min 2 extricate myself & ill call u

**Gina Salvati (650-555-1313):** we will discuss how 2 handle

  
+||+||+

When Eduardo got home, I was sitting on the couch, the laptop closed beside me, having calmed down somewhat during my conversation with Gina and willed myself to concentrate on a book for the past couple of hours. He hung up his raincoat and came over to kiss me, then took a second look and said, “What’s wrong?”

“When were you going to tell me about your sex tape?” I said.

He looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Sex tape?”

“The one that you made with Mark!”

“Mark and I never made a sex tape.”

“OK, fine, sex video! Whatever! The point is, you and Mark filmed yourselves having sex, and you never told me about it!”

“No, Orlain, we didn’t,” Eduardo said, and now he sounded, not angry exactly, but definitely arriving at the edges of it. “I’ve never made a sex tape, or a sex video, or a sex voice recording, or a sex painting, or a sex—I don’t know—sculpture, and the only sex pictures I’ve ever taken are the ones on your camera when we were in the Maldives. Christy wanted us to make a tape, actually, but I always refused.”

“Then why is it on your fucking laptop?” I yelled, and shoved the computer at him. “Open it up and look. It’s right fucking there, Eduardo! Don’t lie to me!”

“There’s not a fucking sex tape on my fucking laptop because it doesn’t fucking exist!” he yelled back, but he took it and opened it—then stared at the resulting picture and breathed out, “What?” He sat down, backed up the file to the beginning, then said, “Oh…oh my God.”

“Now do you remember?” I asked archly.

Silently, he watched the first thirty seconds or so—the same as I had—but when Mark started to go down on him, he Xed out of the player. “I remember parts of the night we—when this was taken,” he said. “But I don’t— Jesus, we were so fucking high. Dustin got his hands on some British Columbia pot that was stronger than anything I’ve ever had before or since, and the four of us sat around and smoked all afternoon. I remember going up to my room with Mark, and I mostly remember it because—because it usually wasn’t like that. It wasn’t usually…happy. He basically dragged me upstairs and it was pretty obvious why; normally we pretended like nothing was going on. But that time it was like he didn’t care. Like he wasn’t ashamed of it. He made some comment about how he wanted to tape himself blowing me, but I don’t—I don’t think I thought he was serious.”

“Yet you didn’t notice the camera?”

“It was probably taken from my webcam. I had one; I used it to talk to Cecília and Leandro. I don’t remember Mark doing anything with the computer, but I don’t remember a lot of that day.”

I looked at Eduardo and he looked back at me.

“I swear to God I don’t remember this,” he said.

“So how did it end up on your computer? And on your computer now? I know this isn’t the same laptop you had your sophomore year in college.”

He ran his hands through his hair. “No. Obviously not. I’ve always transferred my data from images, though, and I’ve never been great about cleaning up my hard drive”—that much was obvious, given all the crap I’d found while searching for the recital video—“so if it was there in 2003 or 2004 or whenever, it’s probably still there. I don’t—I don’t specifically remember looking at my computer the next day, but I do remember that I woke up and Mark was gone—everything back to normal, like we didn’t sleep in each other’s beds and fuck every chance we got. I probably would have checked my email when I got up, and I’d have noticed if anything looked off, so I guess nothing did. Mark must have closed everything and saved the file.”

Reluctantly, I could see it, especially with everything I’d heard—and not just from Eduardo—about Mark at that age. Maybe it had just been another way to take ownership of something that didn’t necessarily belong to him—or maybe it had been a way to remember himself and Eduardo the way they had been that night, silly, loving, and eager. Leaving his best friend asleep, saving the file, probably emailing it to himself, then closing the door and acting like nothing had happened. Maybe he assumed that Eduardo remembered, too, and that Eduardo had simply agreed to maintain their silence.

“I wonder if he still has it,” I said.

Eduardo closed the computer and put it on the floor. “Who knows? I sort of hope not, since he must have known about it all this time and that would be kind of creepy.”

I didn’t ask Eduardo whether he was going to delete it. It seemed like one of those questions he needed to ask and answer himself, and one of those answers I needed to decide that I didn’t have to have.

“How did you run across it, anyway?”

“I was looking for the video of Jenae’s recital. You said it was on your computer.”

“Oh.” He paused. “Actually, I think it’s on my other laptop. Sorry. I’ll look for it later.”

I couldn’t help it: I began to laugh, covering my face with my hands. “After all that—the cat videos from Dustin and your stylish dildo porn and your freaking sex tape—it was on the Mac the whole time?”

Eduardo had the grace to look sheepish.

There was one question that I did have to ask. “So are you going to tell Mark that you found it?”

Eduardo collapsed against the back of the sofa. “ _Putinha de merda_. I don’t know. I’m not sure our newly rekindled friendship is ready for that. I’m not telling Dustin or Chris about it, that’s for sure. Dustin would accidentally wind up telling Page Six, and Chris would just be traumatized.”

“I did tell Gina,” I admitted. Eduardo’s eyes widened, and I said, “I had to tell somebody, and it wasn’t going to be my sister or my mother, you know?”

“Thank God,” Eduardo muttered. “Someday I may be able to look Gina in the eye again.”

“Well, after I assured that it was an old tape and that she didn’t have to arrange your untimely death—”

“I appreciate it.”

“—She may have used the phrase ‘hot twink.’”

This time Eduardo was the one to cover his face with his hands.


End file.
